LEADERSHIP:AFTER FOUR days of tedious negotiations that produced a new favourite contender for the post every few hours, Lucas Papademos was finally selected yesterday by Greece's most senior political leaders to take over the post of premier from George Papandreou.
The formal swearing-in today of the economist and former Greek and European central banker is expected to bring some political stability to a country verging dangerously close to bankruptcy.
“The Greek economy continues to face huge problems despite the great efforts than have been made for fiscal reform,” Mr Papademos (64) said in his first public comments after his selection.
“The choices we will make will be decisive for the Greek people. The path will not be easy but I am convinced the problems will be resolved faster and at a smaller cost if there is unity, understanding and prudence,” he said, adding that Greeks “can be optimistic” if they show common resolve.
Stressing the transitional life-span of his administration, he said its main task would be to ratify and implement the Brussels haircut and second bailout deal struck by euro zone leaders on October 27th and to apply related measures.
Mr Papademos, who has never exercised political office, faces the challenge of running a three-party government in a wholly partisan culture. Coalitions have been rare in Greece, although there was an unlikely, if short-lived, coalition between conservative New Democracy and the Communists in 1989.
His government will comprise MPs from Mr Papandreou’s socialist Pasok and the right-wing Popular Orthodox Rally. New Democracy will also participate in the cabinet, but only with non-elected party officials.
The incoming prime minister said that he had set no terms on any of the parties joining the coalition, thus dismissing claims that party leaders would be required to provide written undertakings that they supported Greece’s second bailout memorandum. Greek journalists said last night that Mr Papandreou’s office had repeatedly leaked the claim that the written undertaking was among a number of preconditions set by Mr Papademos.
Earlier this week, Olli Rehn, the European economics commissioner, said an €8 billion payout under Greece’s existing bailout programme depended on the signing of these declarations.
But in welcoming the news from Athens as “a new chapter for Greece”, European Council president Herman van Rompuy and European Commission president José Manuel Barroso yesterday made no mention of signatures.
With the economy contracting and unemployment surging, Mr Papademos’s interim administration faces a tremendous workload. Elections have been called for February 19th but he has suggested that he may need more time.
Just before the news broke that Mr Papademos would take over, the country’s statistics body released the latest jobless figures. These showed that 18.4 per cent of Greeks, or just over 900,000 people, are out of work.
Among the young, the jobless rate is a crushing 43.5 per cent, up 13 points on the previous year. For the first time, the economically active population has been overtaken by pensioners and other dependants, a phenomenon that will bear heavy burdens on taxpayers.
The three-party grand coalition of sorts now leaves the Left as the only opposition. Criticising Mr Papademos as the choice of Greek and European “plutocrats”, the Communist Party, the country’s third largest, said “the people must field its own labour-popular alliance to oppose this black alliance and to topple it”.
In less than a week, the new government will face mass demonstrations to mark the anniversary of the 1973 student uprising against the military junta.